


Things We Found in the Fire

by Cuda (Scylla)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Firefighters, Angst, Castiel To The Rescue, Firefighter Castiel, Firefighters, Hurt Sam, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Protective Castiel, Protective Dean Winchester, Sastiel - Freeform, Sastiel Love Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 16:25:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12708618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scylla/pseuds/Cuda
Summary: Written for Sastiel Love Week, November 2017. Sam wakes up to his apartment ablaze. He's saved from doom by the worst possible person, although it's hard to look a gift fireman in the mouth.





	Things We Found in the Fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LadyShadowphyre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyShadowphyre/gifts).



Sam woke to a pounding on the bedroom door, and an eternity of searing smoke and a world on fire.

The smoke detector screamed overhead, lost in boiling dark clouds. Sam flew out of bed, inhaled a double lungful of hot, acrid smoke, and hit the floor. The entire inferno galloped down his throat with sharp, steely hooves, and he flopped on the carpet, fingers scrabbling for any kind of purchase.

He rolled onto his belly and dragged himself forward, fueled by adrenaline as the oxygen petered out. His eyes watered, the door blurring in front of him. Underneath it, though, he could see a dull ruddy glow.

This wasn’t how he was going to die, Sam thought, not like this. Not alone, trapped in the shitty bedroom of a shitty twelfth story apartment in Bed-Stuy.

The floor vibrated as something bashed against Sam’s bedroom door again. Now Sam spotted two shadows, breaking the underworld glow. Feet.

Feet?

“SAM!” Bellowed the person on the other side of the door, and then again with more force: “SAM!” An oxygen mask muffled the voice, but Sam had a name made for screaming over oxygen masks.

The door splintered. A couple precise chops with an axe and a well-placed boot managed the mickey-mouser doorknob lock. Sam’s DIY hardware (an extra slide bolt, because he trusted abso-fucking-lutely nothing to chance) went flying across the room. The door swung inward, revealing the owner of the feet.

A fireman. Kitted out for the fucking apocalypse, like this was a disaster movie or a round of Team Fortress 2. “Sam? Fuck!” the fireman shouted, with surprisingly human fear. And oxygen-starved as it was, Sam’s brain still had enough juice left to do a little simple math.

Castiel.

Fuck, indeed.

With the strength of a raging rhino, Castiel looped his arms under Sam’s and dragged him out of the room. Sam remembered later, in greasy smears of memory, the second fireman with the oxygen bottle and the long trip down. Reflections of the carnage wavered on the faceplate of Castiel’s mask. The glass had ripples, Sam thought; he thought something that important would be perfect.

He lost the rest of the night. The white highway lines of twin fluourescent bulbs, as he rolled flat on his back down long hallways. Doctors and nurses asking questions, interspersed with long absences and a chaos of noise. An IV, and then two, and another oxygen mask. Someone came by with ice chips.

Dean arrived, some time between sleeping and waking, and was there when the pain meds wore off. Minor burns, they said; smoke inhalation and some lung damage from the heat. If he’d been on his feet longer than a few seconds, he’d have been beyond saving by the time Castiel got to him.

Dean tried to clean the soot away from Sam’s face, fingers running roughshod over the red welts someone smeared with cooling gel. He talked in a thick voice, little wet bursts of laughter about the cell phone that was probably melted, and how they’d have to find him some new clothes but the gift shop didn’t carry size ‘Yeti.’

Somewhere between all the white noise, Sam began to know he was safe.

Safe.

A memory ghosted up unbidden, of Castiel’s arms under and around Sam like bars of steel, and the hot white lines down the sharp edges of his mask. He’d been carried to safety and now here he was, alive, in a cool white room, his brother framed by the ugly blue diamond pattern of the separating curtain behind him. Fear smeared across his thoughts like the cinders of his burned apartment, and then relief.

He was safe.

The building was still on fire, he thought. Hundreds of other people might still be in there. And Castiel. Castiel was in there somewhere too, probably. But Sam was safe.

He didn’t deserve to be safe.

Sam’s chest tightened; eyes blurring as relief and guilt rooted themselves in deep. The fire in his lungs tried to force its way up his throat. Dean fed him more ice chips, although the nurse warned them to take it slow. The water cooled his throat, numbing the gritty stabs of pain that followed every hard swallow.

They waited in the Emergency Room for hours. Dean wandered the floor, bringing back new details as they surfaced. The fire was almost out. Every hospital in the area had survivors from the fire. One of Sam’s next door neighbors ended up sharing his cramped room. They commisserated - awkwardly - about the fire and the kid with the snarky cockatiel and the lady who played Christmas caroles year round. Sam confirmed he wasn’t responsible for the garlic smell in the hallway. Dean smuggled him a diet Coke.

The nurse came by and made him put his oxygen mask back on.

Castiel arrived some time in the morning. It was probably ungodly early. Sam couldn’t tell. The emergency room was a windowless labyrinth of white light and lineoluem with lines in primary colors. Even in the heat of summer or a white-out snowstorm, Sam had the feeling this room would look the same.

But it was different now, because Castiel was here.

His shift must be over. And because it was Castiel, he’d come without stopping to change clothes, or clean up. The grubby flame-retardant gear made him bulky, larger than life; heroic. His handsome face was dark with soot, right up to the place where his goggles sealed to his cheeks and nose. He looked like a reverse panda.

A Precious Moments panda, maybe. A panda with the saddest eyes.

Castiel sidled in, twisting his car keys in his filthy hands.

At the sight of him, Dean went from doting brother to attack dog. Sam reached out for Dean’s arm, bumping his IV into the rails of the bed. “Dean,” he croaked, pushing the mask away again, “Cas got me out.”

Under Sam’s fingers, he felt the tension start to slide from Dean’s forearm. “Thanks for that,” Dean said, and made gratitude an insult.

“Hello, Dean,” Castiel said wryly. Not unkindly. His gaze fell on Sam again, then, and wouldn’t be swerved. “You’re conscious. That’s very good. I’m grateful.”

Sam nodded. The smell of Sam’s burned apartment intensified as Castiel drew closer, and he retreated behind the oxygen mask. Everything smelled like burnt apartment. Like plastic and sweat and grief.

“I won’t - I won’t stay long,” Castiel promised, retreating a step, “I just needed - wanted - to see you. To make sure you–”

He trailed off. Fiddled and clenched his keyring, in the hand nearest Sam. Finally, his gaze broke. He dropped his chin, like an actor ending scene, and brought it up again with a polite smile. “I’m glad you’re safe, Sam,” he said, turning away.

Another smudgy memory surfaced. Of Castiel yelling his name, muffled by an oxygen mask. The panic that had been in it. The grief. Behind that, the memory of other times - when Castiel said it as he had just now. Soft, alive as a touch.

Thankfully, Castiel’s name translated through oxygen masks just as well. And years, and tension, and memories so old they felt dead beside the heat of now. “CAS,” Sam coughed.

Castiel turned. The saddest reverse panda in New York City. The man who’d dragged him out of Hell. The voice he’d missed. A second chance at forgiveness. And more, of course. There was more. This was probably insane. The smartest thing to do would be to let an ex-fiance walk out of his life again and stay. Chalk it all up to karma or something.

“Stay?” Sam asked.

Castiel’s expression shifted. Softened. He looked down at himself, and back up, and the sad panda look was back. “I’m filthy.”

“Okay,” Sam replied, voice cracking with pain and hope, “come back?”

He heard Dean huff next to his shoulder. “There’s a shower down the hall,” Dean said, amusement bright in his voice, “You need to change?”

Castiel’s eyes darted to Dean’s like a wary animal. “I - probably. This material,” he fingered the heavy jacket lightly, “doesn’t. Um. Breathe.”

Dean’s keys glittered in a long arc across the room. Castiel caught them neatly, and stared at them like they might bite.

“I’ve got a change of clothes in the trunk,” Dean explained, “Top deck of the garage.”

The slow smile that spread over Castiel’s face was almost, almost (not really) worth the burns. “The overwaxed, black Sixties-era extension of your penis?” he asked.

“That’s the one,” Dean confirmed with a smile that didn’t quite say ‘fuck you,’ but rhymed with it.

When he was gone, Dean turned to Sam and said, “Are you sure? Seriously. You probably have like thirty different toxic chemicals swirling around your bean right now from the smoke. Not to mention the percoset - I mean you’re probably a foot massage away from drooling on your shirt. This is a bad time to be making critical life choices, bud.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “I dated him, Dean,” he protested, “And he just saved my life.” And it’s not like I can text him ‘thank you’ later, he thought; my phone is probably a puddle of melted glass.

“'dated him’?” Dean echoed in disbelief, “You mean the guy we went camping with for two weeks in Nevada? The guy I went tuxedo shopping with? The guy who was on my couch every Monday so you could watch Alton Brown torture cooks–”

“–chefs,” Sam corrected, only realizing his lethal misstep afterward.

Dean’s hands spread in defeat. “Fine, whatever. Look. Everything about you and Cas is a crticial life choice. You know it and I know it. You went on a date to the fucking bookstore. Months, Sammy.”

“–Dean,”

“I had to hear about that for months.” Dean gave Sam a flat look, a don’t-stop-me-I’m-on-a-roll-here look, and continued. “I’m not saying ‘no.’ I’m saying if you wanna maybe wait until you get a new phone and a new apartment before you decide you wanna buy a 2018 Pinup Fireman calendar, I can shuffle him out of here right now.”

The horrified part of Sam wished fervently that the smoke inhalation could make him pass out. Most of him, however, squeezed his eyes shut and laughed, even if it hurt his chest. “Pinup calendar?”

“You know what I mean,” Dean whispered.

Sam did know what he meant. As a matter of fact, Dean wasn’t wrong. Everything about the way he’d connected with Castiel had Critical Life Choice written all over it. They’d almost gotten married. But the secretiveness, the worry, the distance and the raw fights towards the end - was Sam ready to risk that?

He hadn’t been an innocent then, and he wasn’t now. But there was a reason why, when he’d realized he was being rescued from a fire full bridal-style by a guy he was still (and probably always going to be) in love with, his first thought was 'fuck.’

Things would always be complicated with Castiel. A guy whose heart was huge. A guy who could have been born with wings on his back. A guy who was always fighting to leave the shadows of his brothers and his big, heroic, out-of-the-picture dad. Sam didn’t need a savior, and dating one made him itchy.

But of the two of them, he’d always been the optimist.

And if he was honest, whenever he thought about Castiel, Sam missed more than he didn’t.

“Yeah,” Sam said finally, “I can handle it, Dean.”

So Castiel came around the corner, clean and wearing Dean’s Metallica shirt and making it look like sarcastic commentary by default. And he sat down beside the edge of Sam’s bed, flustered by the metal rails until Dean showed him how to fold them down.

When Sam offered him his hand, he took it. Which was a Critical Life Choice, of course, but by that point Sam figured they were five deep already so, what the hell.

And he stayed.


End file.
